The cryptocurrency space continues to expand with new blockchain projects seemingly launching on a daily basis. While many of these projects do not contribute anything of note to the cryptocurrency community, some projects are working on solving real challenges that the market is facing.

Blockchain technology is being utilized in innovative ways leading to improvements in several industries, but not without challenges. Along with security, blockchain-based projects are grappling with a scaling problem.

For blockchain technology to realize the potential it possesses as a disruptive force, the scaling challenge must be adequately solved. Aiming to solve this is Zilliqa, a “high throughout blockchain platform.”
The Blockchain Scaling Problem

In the initial stages, blockchains can keep up with the demand on their network. However, as usage increases, the ledger struggles to meet the needs of the ever increasing number of participants, as is especially visible in large networks such as the Bitcoin or Ethereum.

While there are improvement proposals that aim to better the response and throughput of these networks, most are unable to adequately keep up with the growing demand created by the growing group of participants.

The Zilliqa whitepaper explains that is a result of the structure and design of distributed ledgers at their inception:

“The limitations in scaling up existing protocols are somewhat fundamental – they are rooted in the design of the consensus and network protocols. Therefore, even though reengineering the parameters of the existing protocols in say Bitcoin or Ethereum (e.g., the block size or the block rate) may show some speedup, to support applications that need processing of thousands of Tx/s however requires rethinking the underlying protocols from scratch.”